When you pull out a book on the TTC and start penning thoughts there’s a fierce confusion written across the faces of passengers.
That sort of panic animals have when they are threatened by something extraordinary and don’t know what to do. Perhaps there is something to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s line, “the pen is mightier than the sword”?
Regardless, these people have been suckling far too long from the smartphone teet, and are affronted by a tool used for penning some of those books they read on said smartphones or Kindles.
I don’t often say this about public transit, in particular about Toronto’s fine example of urban planning gone wrong, but I do get time to read and write, a bonus. The aforementioned book, is a leather bound collection in which Indigo gouged me for $17.95.
It has poetry, political musings, short story concepts, novel ideas scattered amongst the debris that survived a brainstorm. This is where I write. This is where characters come to life and I illustrate my world.
So, I have created the setting, only in spirit but not in its physicality. I mentioned earlier I was looking at a prison concept. Check. Characters are designed. I don’t like my main character, but I don’t have to because he isn’t really my character. My thrust with horror is social criticism, so the ghost story will be the vehicle.
Oh, yes, there it is – the element of horror: the ghost story. Reading M.R. James has been an influence, I suppose. But I don’t plan on breaking the fourth wall like he does in my tale, by admitting he’s not going to share certain information about the story until later. A device that is tedious at best.
Anyhow, time to wrap this up. In that small minutia of time that is mine on the TTC, I create. Left hand sewing together word and paper. Often times it is lost, the idea, the moment, and then it will become just another page I will come across and say, “That was a good idea…”
Yeah, well not this time.
Oh and before I forget: Red Heat and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. (Still keeping that media check list).